Many of our customers confirmed our observation and, in turn, added one of their own: They wondered how is it, or rather, why is it, that Spanish emails are generally so badly written, with tons of spelling errors, whereas emails in English tend to be more accurate and translation comes out much better.

Our feeling about this: Emails in English are also written very informally, but since English does not require written accents, the number of possible mistakes is much lower; therefore, the translation tends to come out much better.

There was this other question asked: “I tried ESI’s spell checker with the two verbs “cómete” and “ comete” and neither one was highlighted as misspelled. Why is that?”

This is a valid observation. It turns out “cómete” and “comete” are correctly spelled by themselves. The only way to determine which spelling is the appropriate one to use is to analyze them in context, inside a sentence. For that we would need to have a Contextual Spell Checker, a language tool which, as of this day, is not available anywhere in the market. It simply does not exist.

There are many other words that share a similar characteristic, like: olvido and olvidó, sabana and sábana, echo, hecho, hechó and echó, and thousands more.

The next question that you will probably ask us is: Why doesn’t somebody design and sell a Contextual Spell Checker, if it would be such a useful tool in Spanish? Our answer is: It is not a simple tool to design. It requires a complete and sophisticated Spanish parsing system.

Needless to say, Word Magic Software is in the process of designing such a tool and we hope to have it available at our web site before the year is over… Watch out for it!